About Star Sports

Star Sports encourages India to “Imagine a world where sports come first”. As the leading sports channel in India, Star absorbed six different sports properties under one brand: Star Sports, and with one purpose:- Believe.

With a clear-cut forethought and a challenger of risks, star is creating an ambitious vision for sports in the country, thereby focusing on the enthusiasm and passion of India’s youth. Star Sports is committed to building a multi-sports culture.

The network owns a number of rights to varied flagship sporting events. It showcases premier action sports across Indian and International cricket matches by BCCI, International Cricket Council (ICC), Champions League T20, Formula one, Wimbledon, Barclays Premier League, The FA Cup, Olympics, Bundesliga, La Liga and leading Gold tournaments, amongst a range of other popular sporting events. In addition to this, the ICC rights have been bagged by Star Sports till the year 2023, Thereby, continuing its support for sports in India.

Business Objective

Star Sports is a one stop destination that ushers the best of LIVE action sports in India. It offers unparallel live coverage of matches using the most advanced technologies in data integration, commentary, and match highlights with the help of best analysts from around the world.

Situation

Cricket- the word is more than just a sport.
Especially for us, Indians, it is next to religion. Our sentiments are so high when the cricket team begins its preparation of the matches, specifically the special once in 4 years adrenaline filled World Cup.

While the World Cup was doing rounds for the year 2015, the prime focus was to achieve as much high viewership across the country for all matches including INDIA during the year. The world cup 2015 kicked off for India with its arch rival Pakistan. While this became extremely critical for the Channel to garner all eyes on the match, the team just went all guns blazing to ensure it garners the desired eyeballs.

Strategy Adopted for Mauka Mauka by Star Sports (India vs. Pakistan)

One campaign which was out-of-the-box was the Mauka Mauka campaign by Star Sports. The ad campaign assisted the channel to get into limelight. Immense amount of talks, comments, sentiments were flowing with its world cup theme ads. The power of sentiment-led digital marketing is a clear communication through these ads. The string of ads is an effort to create sufficient excitement around the matches. With the challenge of timing, Star has to reckon with a telecast of the WC.

The ad was in commemoration with all India matches, starting with India vs. Pakistan on Feb 15th 2015.
The first ad released on digital platform YouTube was on 7th February, 2015. Within 12 hours of being online, the ad got more than a million organic views. The buzz went viral, not just in India, but all the way to Pakistan as well. It also had twitter campaign simultaneously running with #WontGiveItBack & #MaukaMauka

Results

Just after 12 hours of going online, the ad already had over a million views

It fetched 2.3 million views in 3 weeks

The first ad of Mauka Mauka, India vs Pakistan, was so successful, it set the trend for a creating a series of Mauka Mauka campaign.

Ad spots rate shot up to Rs. 20 lakhs for 10 seconds of air time vis-à-vis an usual operating rate of Rs. 8 lacs

TVR’s for India vs. Pakistan went up to 18 as against an average of 10 TVR

All India Matches clocked an average of over 12 TVR’s post the India vs. Pakistan match which gave Star Sports overall a very good ratings on ICC Cricket World Cup 2015

With rising popularity of these ad series, Star Sports and YepMe.com joined hands to enhance online shopping during the WC season.

VVS Laxman Tweets on Mauka Mauka

With an enormous number of views crossing 10 million, Star India’s ‘Mauka Mauka’ has been the next most-watched campaign in the first quarter of 2015 on YouTube (The campaign comes second only to Gillette’s ‘the best a fan can get’ ad campaign).

Star Sports Bags Digital Award

Learnings

Testing the campaign on Youtube first, before taking it live on a Television commercial, was a wise move my Star. This helped them to gauge the reactions and sentiments around this ad, thereby doubled their confidence to proceed further. The core mantra of the success is a perfect blend of Sentiment towards the sport plus humor.
This ad also proved that, as a platform, YouTube can intensify the reach of a campaign thru’ endemic content.
The Mauka Mauka campaign boasts its clear dominance over other competing campaigns.
Do we even remember any other campaign aired during that time?